Women and the Inner Game of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is not primarily a political allegory but a complex psychomachia written by and for beleaguered males of the 1950s. The inner game of Invasion is a very traditional version of the War Between the Sexes in which overt antagonism has been suppressed and re-projected as a War of the Worlds. Miles’s fear of surrendering to the alien pods—and all they represent—is precisely parallel to, and comments upon, his unarticulated fear of other surrenders: to Becky, his androgynous “other halfto his own uncontrollable passion; and, most importantly, to his (and Siegel’s) hidden desire for forbidden surcease. Surrender, passivity, receptivity, deemed by the patriarchic culture of the ’50s to be mere womanish weakness, are projected onto the alien pods and ultimately rejected as inconsistent with manly emotion—indeed, inconsistent with survival itself. The ambivalent meaning of the pods follows a general rule for SF plots: “anything alien is inhuman to me.” That is, in Invasion, as in male SF in general, the threatening aliens represent distorted projections of anima—not women qua women but women as estranged components of the psyches of the male authors, auteurs (Jack Finney, on whose novel Invasion is based; the late Daniel Mainwaring, the scriptwriter; and Don Siegel, the director). Siegel, a chronic insomniac, apparently driven by a strong need for conscious control, has intended the pods to represent depression, conformity, “other-directedness”—all that is inimical to a thrusting, fight-or-flight definition of the intensely lived life. And so they do—in his text. But in his subtext, in his imagery, the pods also simultaneously convey deep yearnings for surrender, for release, for genderless intimacy and androgynous psychic wholeness. The film flirts with this vision of surcease, of a life beyond macho role-playing. But in the end, it reasserts the simplistic, bi-polar values of the American patriarchy. Miles’s beloved Becky, his passionate “otherhalf,” is revealed as a Judas who betrays her lord with a kiss, leaving him to be rescued by J. Edgar Hoover and his cohorts. Back to the raft again, Huck honey. (NS-F)

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